The future is upon us

Rico says you better decide you like them, if you like driving, because Ronald Ahrens has an article in The New York Times about where we're all headed:

Teams from Virginia, North Carolina, and Winterthur, Switzerland, with roots in the world of auto racing have won the first Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, the $10 million competition aimed at advancing the technology for more fuel-efficient vehicles.
The competition, which began in 2007 with 136 vehicles from 111 teams, required that the vehicles achieve one hundred miles per gallon or the energy equivalent. While two of winning vehicles reached that goal with electric power plants, the top winner did it with an internal combustion engine.
“When you have a background in racing, you focus on what you’re trying to achieve, and you know that you have a given time period to do it,” said Oliver Kuttner, the founder and chief executive of Edison2 of Lynchburg, Virginia, which won the $5 million top prize with its Edison2 Very Light Car. The company’s fabricators and mechanics have worked for teams participating in auto races like the 24 Hours of Daytona and Indianapolis 500.
The other winners of $2.5 million each were the Wave II, a battery-electric vehicle from Li-Ion Motors of Mooresville, North Carolina, in the heart of Nascar country, and the E-Tracer, a battery-electric, enclosed motorcyclelike vehicle from Peraves of Winterthur, which is near Zurich.
The Automotive X Prize is the latest undertaking of the X Prize Foundation of Playa Vista, California, which had sponsored the $10 million Ansari Space X Prize that was won in 2004 by Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, creators of SpaceShipOne. Other foundation competitions include the Google Lunar X Prize, the Archon Genomics X Prize, and the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge.
The Automotive X Prize is the contemporary interpretation of the Mobil Economy Runs and other popular fuel-economy contests that ran through the late-1960s. The X Prize was sponsored by the Progressive Group of Insurance Companies. Glenn Renwick, the chief executive of the Progressive Corporatin, said the company came up with the $10 million purse by diverting money from its advertising budget over the last three years. The X Prize also received up to a $5.5 million grant from the federal Energy Department.
The goal of the Automotive X Prize is to spark the development of super-efficient cars that can be manufactured in large volume. “We wanted to incentivize the dreamers and the doers out there to take on an audacious act,” said Peter Diamandis, X Prize Foundation chairman and chief executive. “This was not an easy competition by any means.”
Noting that the field was reduced to just nine vehicles before the final three were chosen, Mr. Diamandis said, “When we set out to design an X Prize, and were trying to meet that intersection between audacious and achievable, it’s a difficult target to hit. I think we hit it by virtue of the fact that we did have teams able to achieve the objective, but we didn’t have fifty teams able to achieve the objective.”
Indeed, even though 136 vehicles initially were registered after the competition was announced at the 2007 New York auto show, only 41 received design approval last October. On-track testing at the Michigan International Speedway began this spring, but only 24 teams actually fielded vehicles. The elimination process advanced through several stages that the foundation called the Shakedown, Knockout, Finals, and Validation rounds, with testing in a dynamometer chamber at Argonne National Laboratory in August. After the Finals in July, only seven teams with nine vehicles were left.
The competition was broken up into two classes: Mainstream, which was for four-seat vehicles, and Alternative, which had two divisions: two-seats side-by-side and two seats in a tandem, fighter-jet configuration.
Edison2 had entered two Very Light Cars in the Mainstream class, and they were the only two remaining cars in that class. While mechanically identical, each of the Very Light Cars recorded different results at the track, which the team attributed to variables like weather conditions.
Sitting on a 100-inch wheelbase, the car has a chassis of welded steel tubing and a body that resembles a small helicopter, but the entire vehicle weighs just 830 pounds. A rear-mounted, single-cylinder motorcycle engine burns a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline to make about 40 horsepower.
The two entries were driven by Emanuele Pirro, five-time winner of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and Brad Jaeger, a Vanderbilt University engineering graduate and veteran of the Firestone Indy Lights series.
In the Side-by-Side division of the Alternative class, there had to be a tie-breaker because five entries had achieved an average of at least 100 miles per gallon or the equivalent (all were battery-electric vehicles). An efficiency and performance run was held on 27 July, with the vehicles making fifty laps around the two-mile Michigan track without exceeding 70 miles per hour or dropping below 45 miles per hour in a chicane along the backstretch.
The Wave II, driven by Bill Bratton, a veteran of small North Carolina tracks, won the trial by 0.179 seconds and took the championship. The vehicle’s team, the Li-Ion Motors Corporation, occupies a 40,000-square-foot shop in Mooresville that was once used by Chip Ganassi Racing. Ron Cerven, the team leader, used to race at the now defunct Mesa Marin Raceway, near Bakersfield, California. The team used one small electric motor and a proprietary battery management system that balanced the voltage going into the lithium-ion cells. The chassis was made of steel tubing and the body was fiberglass.
Peraves, whose team won the Tandem division in the Alternative class with the E-Tracer, sells a commercial version of the vehicle called the Monotracer. For the competition, the team, X-Tracer Team Switzerland, installed electric powertrains into the two gasoline-powered Monotracers that were entered, creating the E-Tracer. Roger Riedener, the chief executive of the company who once raced in Formula Three, said the very quick E-Tracer is “for those boys who still think that electric motors are for shavers and elevators.”